And now to music - cover versions, to be precise. The most annoying sort, of course, is the re-make of a classic which tries to sound as much like the original as possible - they almost always fail, and what's the point anyway? Then there's the just plain bad - like Madonna's version of American Pie - and Don McLean had already done a bad cover of his classic original.
What spurred this subject was my recent acquisition (recc'd by
frayer of Paul Anka's Rock Swings - a fabulous album of rock songs done in the swing style. Genius. This gives me two versions of Wonderwall - neither the Oasis original, the other being 60s-style Mike Flowers Pops version.I also now have two versions of Smells Like Teen Spirit. Again, the second isn't the Nirvana original, it's from Scala's on the Rocks, which is familiar songs done by a girl's choir. The crowning glory and song which made be buy the album (after one of you recc'd it to me) is a cover of the Divinyls' I Touch Myself. 'Nuff said.
Another double-cover example is Holding Out for a Hero - which I do have the Bonnie Tyler original of. Here, the two covers are both on the Shrek 2 Soundtrack. The Frou Frou version is ... different, but still pretty good. Jennifer Saunders' showtunes-style version from the film's finale, on the other hand, is simply fantastic.
Another fertile ground for cover versions is my collection of Ally McBeal CDs. Music was a very big part of that show, but to keep the style consistent, rather than using original versions of songs, Vonda Shepard would do a cover. Exceptions to that were either when the song was within the show's world (or, more likely, a character's head), or when the singer was doing a guest spot (a quite frequent occurrence).
Which reminds me, I did one of my periodic checks of Vonda's tour page, to discover that she played two nights at the Jazz Café in London last month. [ Long string of expletives deleted ] I went there last October, and it was really one of the highlights of my year. Still, maybe next year...
